Let's treat guns like swimming pools to prevent tragedy

Congress is trying to stem gun violence with empty gestures – limits on the size of ammunition clips and more background checks for gun buyers. The National Rifle Association suggests accelerating a domestic arms race with a budget-busting plan to post armed guards at all our schools.

There is a better way. Let's treat guns like swimming pools.

When you buy a pool, you have to take other people into account. Children find pools irresistible. The law says that if you put something on your property which will foreseeably attract other people's kids, you are liable for what happens to them unless you've taken the necessary precautions (e.g. a fence) to keep them out.

This is the law of "attractive nuisance." We love pools. We have no problem with anyone owning a pool. But we use the law to protect neighbors from having to pay for pools with the lives of their impulsive children.

Now, motivated by fear of liability, pool owners build fences and install locks, preventing countless tragedies. Pool ownership is more expensive up front, but massively less costly to neighbors and, in the long run, to the pool owners themselves. Attractive nuisance law made pool owners count all the costs of a pool.

The same thing should apply to guns. The Constitution affirms your right to own guns. But some people find your guns as attractive as a pool is to a child. If you put your guns where these people can get them, eventually they will get them.

Unfortunately, we can no longer can be surprised if a gun taken from us is used for evil. Newtown's Adam Lanza is only the most recent such case. It's our job to see that our guns do not fall into the hands of a killer. We don't get to leave that job to a school principal under fire, or a teacher desperately defending her first graders.

Someday a lawsuit will reach a court with a wise American judge, faithful to the law and the Constitution, who will rule that the law of attractive nuisance applies to guns, and will hold a gun owner liable for what ensues when her gun falls into the wrong hands. This could happen even without more legislation.

But legislation -- by Congress or the states -- could help hasten the day when every gun owner is on notice: you can own a gun. The Second Amendment guarantees that. But you cannot make your neighbors pay for it. If someone else gets your gun, and kills with it, you will be held liable.

Then the domestic arms race can break its fever. Gun owners will have the economic incentive to limit gun ownership to what they really need, and to ensure no one else can take their guns. And we will have done something meaningful to take the edge off our culture of violence.

Ron Mock is associate professor of political science and peace studies at George Fox University in Newberg.